Of all the tactical-scale scenarios on Vietnam, the LZ X-Ray battles were always my favorite. One obvious reason is that we have, courtesy of Mel Gibson, a nicely vivid visual representation to connect to. Like Mel, the various scenario builders who have tackled this battle with one engine or another have Hal Moore’s book as a source. There is also the U.S. Army publication Seven Firefights in Vietnam, which was written during the war itself. Enthusiasts have the ability to create very detailed and accurate reconstructions of this battle without an inordinate amount of primary-source research.

For my first step, I returned again to Air Assault Task Force. I had a beast of a time getting it to work for the Battle of Mogadishu. Eventually I got it to do something and I hoped that my experience would improve when it came to other battles in this package.

The game, as distributed, includes a four-scenario version of the Battle at LZ X-Ray, each covering a multi-hour snippet over the several days of fighting. One somewhat-unique feature of this package is that it builds the scenarios over scanned maps of the battlefield so as to provide realistic and accurate terrain. In this case, the game map stretches from the 1st Cavalry staging point at Plei Me, through the fire base at LZ Falcon, onto the area of the battle. Part of the challenge is to manage and coordinate helicopter insertion and resupply across that long stretch of jungle.

First wave of landings inbound, I prep the LZ with artillery fire. In contrast to much of the UI, fire mission plotting works fairly well.

Immediately, I’m frustrated by the UI in this game. The game’s first scenario begins with the 1st Cavalry elements on the ground at Plei Me and the helicopter transport and gunships nearby, ready for action. This means that the first order of business is to get the infantry loaded onto the helicopters.

Good luck with that, eh?

As I described in that last article, the insertion mission just doesn’t seem to work for me at all. Manually loading the troops also wouldn’t work. Finally, in desperation, I switched between the multiple versions of this system that I own (namely the newer, but horrific UI, of Air Assault Task Force and its predecessor, The Star and the Crescent). What I found was that, using Air Assault Task Force, I could successfully order the infantry to load up onto the helicopters. I could then save and load back into The Star in the Crescent to manually order my troops to the landing zone.

Flush with success, I sent my helicopters back to pick up more troops and ordered my initial company into a defensive position. The scale of the game doesn’t encourage micromanagement of tactical position. In fact, my initial positioning attempts, for some reason had them wandering off to the north, into the jungle. Hoping to make use of the game engine as it was intended, I gave them the mission “Support by Fire,” to try to get them into the proper defensive position while they waited for reinforcements to arrive. Big mistake.

My AI subordinates are deranged. Or treasonous.

The system decided that the best way to accomplish such a support mission was to march, on foot, all the way back to Plei Me then turn around, march all the way back to the a position in the jungle near the landing zone and then… well, who knows what would happen then, the scenario would have timed out. I’ll point out that I am explicitly trying to defend the cleared area where I will be unloading my helicopters. Even reproducing this bizarre situation is difficult but what appears to have happened is that, because of the limited capacity of my helicopter transport, I’ve split the command that I gave the order to and so the engine’s first order of business is to reunite the command before moving into position.

Reload, try again. My second insertion is complete, but I don’t think they brought any soldiers with them this time. Too bad, the enemy is here.

After reloading and reissuing all the orders, my initial elements appear to be in a defensive position at the landing zone. While the graphics show them to be standing around in a cluster, their status is actually “defilade.” It also appears that all I’ve got there is a company commander and a weapons platoon. When I tried to bring in another group of troopers, everything seemed to go as before, but it looks like the helicopters arrived empty (screenshot immediately above).

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. It baffles me as to how this game has survived to this day is this state. My only guess is that with a saintly amount of perseverance, one can learn to overcome the UI and get the game to do something close to what was intended. Once one puts that amount of effort into it, perhaps there is pleasure to be derived from the game. It is hard to see wasting so much time, though, when moves have me wondering whether helicopters are going to unload units or they have once again shown up empty.

Lt. Col. Moore has set up a headquarters and directs his troopers into position.

Contrast this with a very similar scenario in Steel Panthers. In this scenario also, the clock begins with the 1st Cavalry troopers at Plei Me, ready to be transported, but this time with the first wave embarked. While the map isn’t actually to scale, there is a wide distance between the base and the landing zone, requiring 2 to 3 turns for transport. The victory hexes are awarded largely for gaining control of the landing zone, although there are several more to the west of the LZ. Presumably these additional points represent Lt. Col. Moore’s actual task, which was a search and destroy against suspected enemy positions just beyond his landing site. It wasn’t until after landing that he realized he was fighting a defensive battle against a vastly superior (numerically) force.

As I played this scenario all the way through, my biggest regret came in that opening move. The initial set up not only has the first load of infantry mounted on helicopters but the artillery are loaded-up and waiting at Plei Me also. This is a bit of a departure from reality as one of the LZ Falcon artillery batteries had been in position already for days. The second was to be set-up that morning but planned to land well ahead of the infantry insertion. Not quite realizing what I was dealing with, my artillery was put into place simultaneously with the first infantry landing in LZ X-Ray. I’m quite sure that it didn’t make any difference in the outcome, but I feel cheated not being able to “prep” the landing site with an artillery barrage. That felt import to me.

I also felt the game took a cheap shot at me [SPOILER WARNING – FOR THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH]. There are snipers positioned to hit the in-bound choppers. I didn’t loose anybody to them, but a couple of hits meant that my helicopter “retreated” from the map without having unloaded its troops. The position of the snipers is in a place, and I’ll give it away without being explicit, where the lazy player will get shot up. Problem is, I’m pretty lazy. So even having lost a couple of transports, I continued flying into the same (or at least similar) traps because I wanted to save myself some mouse clicks. Point is, I feel a little cheated in that I was being punished for trying to cut down on the clicking. More clicking is not better gameplay.

Overall, this was a positive scenario from the realism perspective. This wasn’t a precise simulation, but it does tackle the portion of this battle that fit within the limits of the Steel Panthers engine, namely that first hour-and-a-half. It may not, however, be the most interesting part of the battle. While landing, the American forces were slowly realizing the quantity of enemy they faced. This scenario has an unknown quantity and position of the enemy facing you and, certainly, if you push out too rapidly from the landing zone you’re going start suffering losses. The length of the scenario doesn’t give you time for the full encounter to develop and, admirably, the scenario developer didn’t try to squeeze the extras in.

For that we go to Squad Battles.

Squad Battles: Tour of Duty has a LZ X-Ray scenario (as well as an LZ Albany one, which I’ll get to later). Its purpose is, apparently, to capture the moment of the battle where the first three cavalry companies have landed and have the player fend of the initial NVA assaults. With this in mind, there are no helicopter insertions over the course of the scenario. Also, and disappointingly for me, there is no off-board fire-support either from LZ Falcon, from close air support, or from helicopter gunships. This means that the player has only the support from the battalion’s mortar company in addition to direct fire. Furthermore, that direct fire is typically only against adjacent units. This is another scenario set in dense foliage where it is rare to be able to spot enemies across more than one hex.

The Lost Platoon is in serious trouble. Can I get them back in time? No.

All of this means we are looking at what I’ve described before as a typical Squad Battles scenario. The choices are few and you’re already in control of the objectives, so there is little in the way of maneuver that makes sense. The biggest choice is the “lost platoon” and the extent to which you try to rescue it. I probably took something close to the historical path in that I made an attempt to get to it and then stopped when I realized that I couldn’t do it. For what its worth (and, hopefully, not ruining the scenario for anyone), failing to rescue the lost platoon, losing it in its entirety plus incurring casualties among the rescuers; this still gave me a decisive victory. Point being, this isn’t a scenario where you have to pull a rabbit out of the hat and do something that was deemed impossible in the real fight. Simply not being overrun, apparently, counts as a win.

As far as the Tour of Duty scenarios go, this one is average. Average in both size and scope as well as in game play. While it is pretty hemmed in, it doesn’t have quite the frustration level of the “take these three victory locations in six moves” scenarios. Still, given my expectations for this battle, I’ve come away from this one extra disappointed.

There is another LZ X-Ray scenario, one built by an end-user, that I played many years ago. Sadly, it seems to have been lost in the shuffling of website ownership (it used to be stored at wargamer.com when Wargamer archived scenario files). I must have the file on an old hard disk somewhere around here but, up to this point, it hasn’t seemed worth booting up old systems to try to find it. It’s a shame to see this stuff vanish from the internet so arbitrarily, especially as cloud storage becomes ever more available.

In this one, the focus is more on that “broken arrow” moment of the battle; the point when things were at their worst and the maximal air power and fire support that the Americans could muster was brought down around their defensive perimeter. Titled LZ X-Ray – First Contact, it struck me as a truly “fun” scenario in a ways that the above version was not. I’m not sure if it is really much of a challenge from the U.S. side, but you sure get to control a lot of firepower. As a challenging fight, it may be more interesting from the Commie side, trying to get your soldiers to survive the American rain of fire, but I never tried it that way.

If I ever find that file intact, I’ll let you know.

The situation on November 17th. This doesn’t look like what was in Moore’s book.

By way of contrast, I include for you another screenshot of my Ia Drang ’65 scenario, this time where the clock has advanced to the point where the U.S. has seized initiative and what would be the assault on LZ X-Ray. What we see, instead of a recreation of the historical battle, is a typical TOAW scenario. The forces spread out across the map trying to maintain cohesive lines while simultaneously cutting off and isolating the enemy. Engagements are somewhat limited by the scenario’s withdrawl schedule, but the engine would seem to encourage continuous attack right up until the time limit runs out, so as not to leave any victory points on the table. At least that’s the way I and my computer opponent are playing it.

What should have happened just before X-Ray, I found out by reading Seven Firefights in Vietnam, was that the NVA was regrouping for another shot at Plei Me, likely to take place within a few turns had the U.S. not took the fight to them. Communist forces were largely idle, preparing themselves for their own attack. Likewise, the 1st Calvary units were moving about the map trying to find an elusive enemy, not perpetually engaging them as they retreated or counter-attacked. This lead to a period of relative quiet between the breaking up of the attack on Plei Me and the three days of fighting over the landing zone.

Seven Firefights in Vietnam is, as I said, another reason why this battle gets the simulation love that it has. Reading it, as I did, well after reading We Were Soldiers Once…, it can feel somewhat anticlimactic, but certainly not a complete waste of time. Seven Firefights is but a chapter in a book that’s only 150+ pages total, so you know its going to not have the depth of the later work. It also focus on tactics. It was meant to be a learning tool for the professional soldier about a war that was still ongoing. Moore’s book, by contrast, is in part a tribute to the fallen soldiers of the battle and the war and tends to have a lot more focus on the personal rather than just tactics and command.

OK. So this is … unique.

Seven Firefights is a nice, easily digestible account of the battle that is made all the better by the fact that is available for free as a electronic book. While mostly encompassed by newer accounts, it still gave me some unique insights into the fight.

Speaking of available for free, the website for the book has battle animations that illustrate the fight in a way superior to most other attempts that I’ve seen. Again, very valuable for helping to all that happened over those three days into a proper perspective.

I’ve logged an inexplicably large number of hours playing Arab-Israeli Wars lately. It’s not really a good game, in fact, it is barely even a game. The rules are designed to be played solitaire with a custom deck, but I’ve been playing it on the computer. It tends to start up really fast, so it is something I can run while my system is churning away on other things. Add to that, a game can be finished in, usually, 5 to 10 minutes. That makes it ideal when I want to momentarily distract myself while my computer is preventing me from doing anything important but I don’t want to get up an walk away. The fact that at least half of the games are not challenging, either impossible to win or impossible to lose, doesn’t seem to deter me.

I bring this up now, because I’ve just started playing Vietnam ’65 from Slitherine/Matrix Games. As I’ve been thinking about the design of Vietnam games recently, my first focus was on its design.

Vietnam ’65 is also a “solitaire” game, in that it is meant to be played only as the Counter Insurgent side (the U.S.) against the communists. Normally, we would call this “single player only” or some such, but having in my head this explicitly-solitaire game design, I realize the similarities.

While the manual is non-specific, the tutorial indicates this game represents the Ia Drang valley campaigns of Fall 1965.

Don’t get me wrong. Vietnam ’65 is not a trivial or simple game that I’m trying to compare directly to the first example. There is plenty under the hood to make this game worthwhile and I, for one, find it incredibly addictive. The comparison here is more about game design decisions than the game itself.

Vietnam ’65 is a very-abstracted representation of the Vietnam War some time toward the end of 1965. In fact, pretty much the only way I know the timeframe of the game is that this what it says in the title. When you start the game, you are given a randomly-generate piece of real estate, peppered with villages, roads, rivers and jungles. Obviously, being randomly generated, its not going to correspond to a specific geographic location. Neither does the manual get more specific. The tutorial, however, explains that we are operating in the Ia Drang Valley in the Central Highlands, further fixing time and place to the fall of 1965 and something like Operation Silver Bayonet.

My randomly-generated province. The mini-map shows everything on one screen. It will be hard extending my forces to the eastern edge of this map.

The goal of the game is to achieve the “Hearts and Minds” strategy of the American military. Each of the villages have sympathies that lean toward the Americans, toward the insurgents, or somewhere in between. Throughout the game, the communist units’ activities will attempt to influence village sympathies their way while you must trying to bring them back over to you. Whichever side succeeds in moving the needle wins the game.

Villages are influenced, incrementally, by visiting them. Some villages, when visited by the player, will also give up intel on enemy positions. Greater influence can be had by achieving military victories in the vicinity of a village. Villagers want to be on the side of the winner, so defeating communists near a village will provide a relatively larger boost. In addition to the village scores, the player also manages “political points,” which provides the currency through which he purchases and manages his units. Simplified, when the player operates successfully that allows him to allocate even more resources going forward. But the opposite is true. One can get into a death spiral where failures in the field deprive you of the resources you need to recover.

On this map, the remote villages present a challenge. They are hard to reach and the units sent to the remote corners of the map, once there, become hard to supply.

As simple as it is, the game is (as I said) incredibly addicting. Once I got the hang of it, the 45 turn default game can be run through in one sitting*. Let me get back to what I started off this article with and that is the game’s simplicity and how it applies to the design.

Even after a good many games under my belt, it seems like the win or lose can go either way. In the particular game portrayed in the above and below screenshots, I wound up losing. The winability of any given game is very much dependent on the initial layout of the map plus a dash of luck when encountering your enemies. Good decisions and good outcomes in your combat tend to reinforce success, which you grow to a win. I will add that setbacks don’t have to be fatal, and this is another plus for this game. In some cases, a very bad situation can be reversed and turned into a win.

That initial random setup places the villages, rivers, and jungles and shows it to you on a map before you start. In addition the visible placements there are also”Ho Chi Minh Trail” locations which you can’t see. These hexes are the “spawn points” (to genre-mix my gaming terminology) for the Viet Cong units. Those units are assigned a “mission” which they try to complete, typically moving toward a designated location. A common mission would be to move a unit to a particular (the closest) village, at which point the unit is expended in order to move the influence in the village slightly toward the communists. Another mission involves moving towards an ambush point so as to subsequently attack passing U.S. units.

As the game progresses, the challenge posed by the enemy’s missions grows. The quantity and type of enemy missions conducted against you are determined by the influence score, again reinforcing previous successes or failures. The more successful the enemy was in the past, the more aggressive he’ll become in his future missions.

Executing these missions don’t require any particular smarts on the part of the AI. Having selected the unit and mission, completing them can be very formulaic, as far as the computer’s programing is concerned. There are a couple of missions that involve NVA units seeking out and destroying the player’s assets, but even these don’t involve much in the way of computer player strategy.

In this case, it is the complexity of how a number of simultaneous missions combine to create a hazardous battlefield that creates a tough gaming for the player, not the “AI” of the enemy. In particular, because enemy locations are hidden unless “spotted” by some fairly restrictive sight rules, you are often left feeling around in the dark for the enemy. Because of this, the mindlessness, if you will, of that enemy, isn’t apparent or particularly relevant.

Artillery adds dignity to what otherwise would be a vulgar brawl. The remote firebase lets me extend my reach.

I’m imagining that there is a higher level of gameplay, a strategy of an “expert player” if you will, that works to anticipate the movement of the enemies based on their rules. If I were to try to ferret out the locations of the Ho Chi Minh Trail points and actively interdict them, and then try to intercept NVA movement from their spawn point (the Western edge of the map), I could probably be a much more effective player. As it is, I tend to be stretched thin enough that I’m mostly reacting to the enemy as I find them rather than dealing with them as part of some strategic plan. I’ve handed the initiative over to the enemy and I rely on the fact that that enemy isn’t really capable of much in the way of initiative.

One last point about this game. I’ll not go into too much detail here, although it might perhaps be worth returning to some day. On one hand, this is a very abstract game, difficult to connect in any significant way back to the historical operations that it approximates. At the same time, it captures certain essential features of counter-insurgence warfare and aspects of the asymmetric nature of the fight between the U.S. and the NVA/VC. Bottom line, I think there is more to this game, perhaps, than meets the eye.

With the U.S. 1st Cavalry in support, the ARVN move to reinforce Plei Me.

As a point of comparison, the alternative for operational level Vietnam warfare is The Operational Art of War. At the same time I’m looking at Vietnam ’65, I have my tablet out so I can work through the Silver Bayonet operation as presented in the Vietnam 1965 Combat Operations series of scenarios. This puts the operation in the context of the larger war and gives the perspective as to which units were allocated into and out of the particular theater of operation.

Playing this scenario takes some effort. Each turn requires the review of the notes and careful plotting of the historical movements. Having completed the first volume with a rather unsatisfying draw, I’ve been making an effort to take victory locations beyond what is specified in the narrative, if I can do it without significantly re-purposing units away from their historical assignments. At the same time, though, I am still trying to accomplish every mission that the instructions designate plus satisfy the described historical actions, even when they don’t count for points. The uniqueness of this scenario design makes for a nice compare-and-contrast with another TOAW scenario covering Operation Silver Bayonet.

The ARVN relief column has been ambushed on its way to Plei Me. The fight is on.

One of the original scenarios that came with TOAW was Ia Drang ’65, a treatment of Operation Silver Bayonet at the operational level. As one of the original scenarios, it is limited and focused in its scope. By contrast, so many of the user-made scenarios lean towards the monster end of the scale. Ia Drang ’65 also makes use of a few of the special game features (reinforcement/withdrawal and hidden objectives are two that stand out) without trying to force the game engine outside of that which it is capable.

The map is limited to Pleiku (City), Plei Me, and the Ia Drang Valley westward to the Cambodian border. Units under control are only those that were tasked to the operation in question and the game engine takes care of adding and withdrawing those units as appropriate. Game turns are half-a-week and are played on 2.5 km hexes. In a sharp contrast to my recent immersion in Vietnam 1965 Combat Operations, units are represented per company rather than battalion, making for finer grained command.

I’ll come back to this all to discuss the intense fighting that took place in mid-November during the two battles detailed inWe Were Soldiers. Commenting merely on the province-wide, operational-level representation of Vietnam in 1965, though, we’ve got some different methodologies that produce very different experiences.

Vietnam 1965 Combat Operations, with its focus on reproducing the historical war, still makes for the best historical experience but at the price of the effort the player must put into bookkeeping. It is also somewhere between the strategic and operational levels (albeit with much of the strategy suggested to you via the accompanying narrative). It is a country-wide simulation at a scale where the real drama of a particular operation might come and go in a turn or two and with most of the action taking place off-line (e.g. Silver Bayonet is completed, +5 victory points is not as satisfying as directing the units as they duke it out).

Ia Drang ’65 both gets down to a more interesting level and gives you much more control, but the price here is that you quickly fly off the historical rails. Like I’ve said about other TOAW Cold War treatments, the turn length and TOAW system doesn’t quite match Vietnam’s fighting style. TOAW tends to drive you towards continuous and maximized operations up through the end of the game. While rest and resupply are a factor and must be managed, actually having units sit idle just means you’re leaving victory points on the table. Contrast this with a the way Vietnam 1965 Combat Operations regulates the country-wide allocation of units. At any given time, in most of Vietnam, units are just sittin’ around. You are neither driven to move everything into the “front line” or constantly get yourself prepared for the enemy to pop up out of nowhere. Ia Drang ’65 gameplay doesn’t match the cat-and-mouse nature of most of this campaign. Once the sides are engaged in this fight, it’s pretty much a month-long engagement using traditional hex-and-counter methods until units are eliminated or withdrawn per the rules.

This brings it back to the unique place that Vietnam ’65 fills as an operational simulation. This one really gets you away from that opposing lines of counters situation that most operational boardgames (and their digital equivalents) seem to exhibit. The intention of the game is to integrate a much fuller gamut of actions that might have been taking place in an active province undergoing counter-insurgency operations. In TOAW, unless at least company-level engagements are taking place, actions would be “below the radar” on the map. In Vietnam ’65, on the other hand, we have to send troops out to try to intercept enemies. Even if we’re not actively finding the enemy, we need to just to drop in on the villagers to ask for information about recent enemy movements. This is integrated with a representation (as abstract as that may be) of larger unit engagements with the NVA and the penalties that escalating commitment imposes on your ultimate victory.

I’ll end with a thought experiment for the reader, albeit a reader who has some familiarity with Vietnam ’65. What would an LZ XRay/Albany engagement look like implemented in this engine? Is it even possible? Or is it the best we can do with this game, when we want to approximate an NVA major operation, to toss in a tank and call it good?

Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles or go on to the next article, taking it back down to the tactical level, albeit for a different battle. You may also jump ahead to the tactical article on the LZ X-Ray fighting.

*There’s a saying that any pizza is a “Individual Pizza” if you’re willing to apply yourself. Likewise, its less that the game length is all that short than that I seem to be unable to get out of my chair until I’ve finished.

One of the pleasures of visiting relatives over Thanksgiving is that I have heretofore unexplored bookshelves from which to choose reading material. The downside is I rarely have time to finish while I’m there, meaning I’m usually stuck adding to my own bookshelf when my flight arrives back at home.

This year I pulled, from my father’s bookshelf, the book Black Hawk Down. I’ve watched the movie based on that book now a couple of times (I may even watch it again, now having finished the book) but never read the original (source) material. The movie struck me as decent, but not exceptional. By contrast, the book is exceptional, turning the an assembly of facts into a easily read story. Naturally, one can see where the movie took its scenes from within the pages of the book, but as is almost always the case, a film rarely does justice to a well written book.

This book also presents a much more balanced view of the fight than I had expected. Americans are critical both of each other and of the plan. Somalian fighters and witnesses are included, with a description of the event from their own perspective – the “other side,” if you will.

The author writes how it surprised him, when undertaking this project, that while the battle itself was extremely well documented (due to the technologies in use at the time), nobody else attempted to condense it into a narrative. In particular, he figured there would be a military-produced discussion of the battle which he could turn into a novel-like narrative. Instead, he has found himself now an expert, even as a resource to the armed forces, on what happened in October of 1993.

War is All Hell

Some time ago, I took a look at a The Star and the Crescent as an engine for the 1956 Arab-Israeli War. I have the pair of TSatC and Air Assault Task Force, both of which can play the scenarios built for the other. As I explained then, the AATF interface suffers from a non-configurable mouse, and I find it therefore unplayable. But TSatC uses a Windows interface that a) uses the system configurations and b) plays a lot better with the modern screen sizes. Air Assault Task Force was designed for exactly the kind of mission that began the Battle of Mogadishu and, in fact, ships with four scenarios depicting various phases of the battle. I therefore felt compelled to give it a try as I was wrapping up the book.

I want to give this package a chance. I try to give this package a chance. I feel my love is unrequited. While I am trying my best to make it work, it is trying its best to make me hate it.

In my previous game, the battle at Bir Gifgafa, I had all all-armor force at my command. Therefore, interacting with the scenario was mostly about getting move orders to the units to execute and then letting them engage enemies as they find them. That was trouble enough, but I seemed to finally get it figured out. For this battle, my force is all infantry to be transported by helicopter (the ground force, the extraction convoy, is modeled as an “allied force” in the first scenario). That means that the commands I need to be entering get considerably more complex. I need to load the helicopters, transport, unload at the target, and then maneuver all the little pieces into the right positions.

Sometimes it seems like a game developer was making an honest effort to program in Windows, and then just arbitrarily said “Aw, fuck it. Let’s just get it out the door.” Of course, this can’t be it. The program that is Air Assault Task Force has been nearly 20 years in the making. And in its defense, it does do much of the job expected from a 1998-era game; The AI seems to do what it is supposed to; The game doesn’t suffer crashes; And the modeling of the battlefield is taken seriously (again, relative to games of 1998).

Yes, it may be ugly. But it is also a real pain in the ass to use. Black Hawks insert Rangers near the target house in Mogadishu. Maybe. Or not. Who the hell can tell?

Still, to get all of that, you have to get past the user interface.

I complained before, and I’ll say it again. The manual seems to add insult to injury. As I try to load up and deliver my assault force, nothing is working. Sometimes the helicopters fly their mission without the infantry, and sometimes the infantry tries to set off on foot. As before, units simply refuse to move despite repeated attempts to command them to get going. Referring to the manual, it gives a simple set of instructions, editorially explaining how easy it all is. “The commands you give are those that a real battle commander would be issuing!” I don’t want a marketing pitch, I want to be shown why when I follow the instructions, it doesn’t do what you say its going to do.

A little aside on this, because it was so annoying. A pair of critical commands, “Halt” and “Hold Fire” are set by toggle. So if you want to “not Halt” (i.e. get moving!), you need to select “Halt.” Same with “Hold Fire.” However, if the units have any mix of “Halt” and “not Halt” status, then “Halt” will actually do what it says. Halt. Which means to “not Halt”, you’ve got to select your halted units, tell them to halt (which they do) and then select them again, and tell them to “Halt” to get them moving. Problem is, pressing the command also deselects the units, so you have to remember to repeat the entire process. It also seems possible that somewhere in the path logic, some of your units are set automatically to halt, in which case the selected units will always be mixed and therefore can be commanded only to “Halt,” never “not Halt.”

Finally, I got a combination of commands that seemed to work. Several obvious items just don’t. The “Insertion Mission,” pretty much what I want to do, I just can’t get working. Commanding at different levels in the command hierarchy seems fraught with danger. It gets me wondering if I am alone in simply not being able to get this system. I was scanning the forums and found a user trying to deliver ammo resupply, and being unable to do so. Later he posts, “Never mind, I’ve got it figured out. I had to set the helicopters to defilade.”

What? Why!?! Where in the manual does it suggest that as a solution!?

I think maybe the key here is that once you figure out enough of the quirks and have your own method to muddle through the interface, then the game can be played as it should be.

My soldiers are all delivered and the extraction force (the trucks with green circles) are nearly there. For some reason, its going to take several more hours to complete the mission. See the dead skinnies piling up all around me.

As I said, there are four scenarios. The first of the four is the mission as it was planned. You take control of the objective with Rangers and Delta Force, and then hold until the extraction force arrive. And then hold some more (the victory condition is time based). My goal was simply to try to get the little digital men to do what the mission plan called for. The remaining 3 scenarios start at various places in the mission after the helicopters have crashed.

Black Hawk down.

I will point out that the “little men” view in my first two screenshots is just one of the modes for displaying forces. In this third screen, I’m using NATO symbols to display unit positions, and that usually makes it a little easier to see what is going on. I’m not sure it is particularly less ugly, though.

Besides the interface problems, a couple of issues stood out to me. In my last try with this game engine, I was pleased because the scenario ended early when the system calculated that the computer player could no longer accomplish any of its missions. In this scenario, I have something like an hour of time remaining and apparently nothing going on. At the maximum time-compression for game play, that’s still almost 8 minutes of staring at a screen showing nothing.

Another problem, and this is one I’ve run into in other games, concerns the helicopters. It would seem to me that the chief advantage of the helicopter as a firing platform is that it can keep moving. In use, unless you’re actively pulverizing a target, you would never want to stop (and make yourself into a target). In this game (and others), actually giving orders to helicopters to execute some kind of “racetrack” station-keeping is a whole lot of effort. Not knowing how things are modeled, I wonder whether this would even buy me much in terms of the end result. I do feel pretty stupid having all the helicopters just hovering, non-moving, over an on-going battle.

As much as I complain, I find I just can’t quit this baby. Even 20 years on, it still is one of the few games that attempts to simulate modern, asymmetrical warfare with an emphasis on realistic results. While other options exist, I don’t know that any get it right at this scale.